I’ve been struggling with duplicates generated by DEVONthink. I’ve settled on an approach, but would like to confirm that it is the best one and that I’m not missing something that could make it easier.
I have DEVONthink on two laptops and DEVONthink To Go on my phone. Because of DEVONthink To Go, I need to use DEVONthink’s database synchronization with “Synchronize content of indexed items” enabled. Also, I do need access to my documents on other platforms, so I need to use cloud synchronization (with iCloud and Dropbox) and have DEVONthink index that content.
All of my cloud content is always available on disk rather than just on use.
I tried to use DEVONthink’s database synchronization (I’ve tried iCloud and Dropbox) between my three devices. I often end up with duplicate entries - two identically named entries in DEVONthink pointing to the same external file. This usually happens on my secondary laptop, probably because of the timing of the cloud synchronization and DEVONthink’s when first starting up that laptop after many changes have been made on my primary one.
Your (absolutely exquisite) manual discusses my use case and doesn’t raise any red flags except for duplicated content in the cloud; I have plenty of space so that is of no concern.
My current approach to avoid this is to use DEVONthink’s synchronization only on my primary laptop and DEVONthink To Go. On my secondary laptop I have unsychronized databases which index the same cloud folders.
I do see that DEVONthink’s synchronization settings allow me to choose how to deal with conflicts. I have that set to “Duplicate documents”. But, duplicates due to editing conflicts are not what I’m trying to address. If there were a real conflict, I would want the duplication so that I could intervene and possibly merge the documents.
Is using different databases on my secondary laptop the best I can hope for? I believe that I’m losing some things by not having the same databases on that laptop.